i know senator mccain cares about it, i offered to sit down with senator mccain and you and others and work this through. i think in fact senator whitehouse asked to see some folks at the white house to talk about this. but we need to change assaad's calculation. right now president assad doesn't think he's losing and the opposition thinks it's winning. that is not an equation that allows you to reach some accommodation for transition. the goal of the obama administration, i think the goal of the international community, is to affect some kind of orderly transition. now, it's complicated by the fact that now a second envoy has been engaged after kofi annan's efforts, and both have found an intransigence on the part of the opposition to be willing to negotiate a departure. the russians have indicated, and i've had personal associations, which indicated a russian willingness to in fact see president assaad lead but they have a different sense of the timing and manner of that. our hope, my hope, would be that if confirmed and when i get in there, to have an ability to really take the temp